the profession

Stands Scotland where it did? Perspectives and
possibilities for Child and Youth Care

Mark Smith

Abstract: A number of recent and forthcoming
developments will shape the direction and professional identity of
services for children and youth in Scotland for the foreseeable future.
Approaches to child and youth care historically have been shaped by two
defining relationships “the country’s political relationship with
England and the discipline’s relationship with the social work
profession within which it is currently located. This article charts the
development of policy and provision in Scotland and considers
possibilities for and threats to the development of a professional
identity for the field.

A number of recent and forthcoming developments will
shape the direction and professional identity of residential services
for children and youth in Scotland for the foreseeable future.

The Scottish Executive has provided substantial
funding to establish The Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care
(SIRCC). SIRCC has a range of objectives aimed at improving education
and training in the discipline, ranging from short course delivery
through to the development of a Masters programme.

Two new government sponsored bodies, the Scottish
Social Services Council (SSSC) and the Scottish Commission for the
Regulation of Care (SCRC) will also be instrumental in shaping the
future. The task of deciding upon and regulating training in social work
generally has recently moved from the Central Council for Education and
Training in Social Work (CCETSW) to the SSSC. One of the SSSC’s functions is to determine the type and level of qualification to be held
by workers in residential child care. The other new body, The SCRC has
the task of setting National Standards and inspecting residential units
against these.
On top of these developments, the whole area of children and youth has
recently hit the political agenda. The education minister has initiated
a national debate which, if sufficiently broad, has the potential to
impact on residential care. The message in relation to youth in trouble
is at times contradictory. On the one hand, for instance, there is a
real commitment to improving educational opportunities for young people
in care. On the other, there has been a spate of populist pronouncements
calling for more punitive responses to youth crime. Whilst
understandings may be incomplete there is at least an awareness of youth
in political circles.

There is a growing international awareness that
services for children and youth should reflect the cultural experience
of the recipients of that service (Fulcher 1998). Over the centuries,
Scottish approaches to the various manifestations of human need have
drawn upon the country’s distinct religious and philosophical
traditions. They reflect a particular view of social welfare stemming in
large part from the Reformation and the manner in which the reformed
Church went about its Christian mission. Yet, distinct features of the
Scottish tradition are regularly subsumed within historical accounts
which reflect dominant English, philosophical and policy trends and
assumptions (see Carlebach 1970 for instance). The intention of this
article is to outline some of the strands of this tradition that it
might inform any debate about the future direction of provision for
children and youth.

Scotland and England
The Scottish psyche is significantly shaped by the country’s relationship with its nearest neighbour, England. It is an, at times,
uneasy relationship, characterised by a peculiar assertion of difference
yet very often, a simultaneous adoption of English social and policy
trends. This situation is one resulting from the combination of
Scotland's struggle through the Middle Ages to avoid being militarily
and politically overcome by England, with the inevitable interdependence
which results from such close geographical proximity.

The crowns of the two countries were united in 1603
when James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne. Political
union came a century later in 1707. Assimilation at an institutional
level was never complete though and Scotland retained distinct legal and
educational systems as well as a separate national church, the
Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The union of 1707 failed too, to
entirely suppress Scottish national identity and over the past 300 years
there were persistent demands for a reassertion of home rule. These were
largely realised in 1999 with the re-establishment of a Scottish
Parliament. Authority for matters relating to children and youth are
vested in the parliament, sitting in Edinburgh.

The Pre-Reformation Church and Society
Traditions of caring for and educating children were evident within the
pre-Reformation church. Early collections of Celtic church law,
emanating from great religious communities like Iona, included detailed
provisions for the care of foundlings and orphans (Furnivall, McQuarrie
and Smith 2001). The notion of wider family and community responsibility
was fundamental to the clan system, which was the bedrock of social
organisation in large areas of the country.

The Reformation
The Reformation in Scotland drew on Calvinist doctrine, mediated for the
particular national context by John Knox and Andrew Melville. The
Reformation placed the onus of providing social welfare onto parish
communities. The parish assumed responsibility for the care of the sick,
orphans and those who had fallen on hard times. The Kirk, as well as
administering poor relief also took responsibility for education. This
was to ensure the Calvinist imperative that everyone should have direct
access to The Bible unmediated by the clergy. In order to do so they had
to be able to read. Each parish therefore had a school and the
educational ideal became well established in Scottish life. Whilst the
motivation for mass education had doctrinal roots, it’s nature,
certainly at university level, was broad and encouraging of a
metaphysical disputatiousness. Social structures likewise were,
structurally at least, influenced by a notion of “militant democracy” and were strikingly egalitarian and accountable (Furnivall, McQuarrie
and Smith 2001).

The system of parochial responsibility adopted
approaches to social welfare which were largely family based. The
preferred way of responding to orphan or destitute children was for them
to be "boarded out" with respectable families. This was not always a
purely philanthropic response and children (especially older ones) were
often used as cheap labour on family farms or businesses (Abrams 1998).

The tradition of boarding out contributed to an
aversion in Scotland to institutional care. The workhouse model of poor
relief, which was predominant in England, was virtually unknown in
Scotland outwith Glasgow, Edinburgh and Paisley (Triseliotis 1988).
Outdoor or community-based relief was far more common. Workhouse
provision did expand in Scotland from around 1844, largely as a result
of urbanisation and the breakdown of the parish system. This development
also saw an increased adoption of the doctrine of "less eligibility"
deriving from the English poor law tradition. (Less eligibility is the
notion that life in an institution should be less desirable (eligible)
than that which a person might experience outwith the institution. This
was deemed necessary to prevent people wanting access to the workhouses
and thereby becoming a financial burden on the authorities. It is a
doctrine which has dogged welfare provision to a greater or lesser
degree ever since.)

The onset of industrialisation in the early part of
the nineteenth Century brought about a fragmentation of the parish
system of education and poor relief established at the time of the
Reformation. Ironically, the Factory Acts of the 1830–s, which sought to
cushion children from the worst excesses of industrialisation, actually
forced them to substitute for industrial earnings whatever they could
eke out on the streets through begging or stealing. When their
activities were deemed to constitute deviance, the response was often
prison. In the early 1840s Bailie Mack in Edinburgh reported to the
Parochial Board that children as young as five were regularly appearing
before him charged with stealing. He was reluctant to send them to
prison but for the seven-year-old recidivist he felt he had little
option but to do so.

The “Ragged” Schools
The Scottish response to the problems experienced and presented by the
displaced child on the street was an innovative and enlightened one. It
was rooted in a pietistic urge, which, according to Checkland (1980)
must be viewed as a continuum whereby the inheritance of the Reformation
could pervade Victorian life. The practical realisation of this
philosophy, was the opening of the first industrial feeding school in
Aberdeen in 1941, under the patronage of Sheriff Watson. The school
sought "to feed, train in work habits and give basic education" to the
children who attended. The industrial feeding or “ragged” schools were
characterised by the national aversion to institutional care. They
stressed a preventative as opposed to a punitive philosophy. This was
encapsulated in the exhortations of Dr. Thomas Guthrie, a pioneer of the
movement to "seek to prevent that there may be no occasion to punish"
and that, "the guilty party is not the child at the bar" (Smith 1988).
Guthrie’s interest in street children was a reflection of a wider social
movement associated with the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in
1843. The Disruption saw the evangelical wing, led by Thomas Chalmers,
often regarded as the father of Scottish social work, break away from
what was perceived to be an increasingly comfortable and complacent
established Kirk. The mission of the evangelical movement was to bring a
Christian presence into the developing centres of population.

Guthrie promoted the cause of the ragged schools
through three national “Pleas”. The movement was a remarkable success
with schools being established in every city and most sizeable towns
within months of his First Plea. Alongside the voluntary principle went
a commitment to offering the resource as a day school, which sought to
strengthen rather than weaken family links. Contemporary accounts
consider that, "the family is the place ordained and prepared by God for
the training and upbringing of children”, and that “if a child is
separated from its parents and kept at school apart from its home, the
child immediately becomes hard and apathetic.” (Seed p.324). Guthrie’s hope was that children should return home, "carrying with them many a
holy lesson”..as Christian missionaries to these dwellings of darkness
and sin" (Smith 1988). Such assumptions challenge present day
representations of the child as merely a recipient of pernicious family
influences, by stressing a more interactive relationship and attempting
to use the chi1d as a benign influence upon the family to which he or
she returned each evening. Children unable to return to their families
in the evening were boarded out or occasionally offered respite
accommodation on school premises. Proponents of the ragged schools
explicitly eschewed the “hospital” model of care, which involved
removing children from their families.

Such ideas differed fundamentally from prevailing
English approaches to delinquency rooted in the doctrine of “less
eligibility” and emphasising the diagnosis of moral failings and the
application of specific interventions to address these (Carlebach 1970).
Moreover, whilst education was considered to be a positive force towards
social cohesion in Scotland, the English tradition considered the
education of the working classes as encouraging of sedition (Smout
1977). And whilst there were undoubtedly authoritarian aspects to
Scottish education, it was essentially characterised, according to
Scotland (1970) by the Platonic nature of the master-pupil relationship.

The response to delinquency offered by the ragged
schools seems to have met with remarkable success. By the early 1850–s,
Governor Smith of Edinburgh Prisons reported, "Whereas in 1947 more than
5% of the prisoners in Calton Jail were under 14, by 1851 this had
fallen to less than 1%. I can have no doubt that the ragged industrial
schools have been the principal instrument in this fall". The efficacy
of the approach fulfilled Guthrie’s utilitarian belief that it was
better to pay for the education of the child than the imprisonment of
the adult in later life.

Acts of Parliament passed in 1854 secured state
funding for the schools. However, subsequent Acts of 1861 and 1865
ensured that funding only applied to children committed to the schools
through the Courts. As such the legislation sounded the death knell for
Guthrie’s and Watson's peculiarly Scottish conception of the industrial
feeding school, through superimposing the prevailing English reformatory
and industrial school model under the direction of the Home Office.

Internal divisions also arose in the ragged school
movement itself, not for the last time in Scottish society, along
sectarian lines but also between supporters of Watson and Guthrie’s original ideals and those who supported a residential mode of provision.
Nevertheless, an interesting insight into the durability of underpinning
Scottish beliefs is provided in a government report from 1896, which
states that, "Scotch reformatories are not looked upon with public
favour on account of the aversion felt by the Scotch people to the
imprisonment of children".

Features of the Scottish tradition might be summed
up thus:

the need to cater for children's physical needs

the importance of education

prevention rather than cure

a focus on needs rather than deeds

the voluntary nature of provision

the preference for day provision which
maintained family ties

structure and discipline

The Rescue period
The second half of the nineteenth century has become known as the
"rescue period" in social welfare provision. In contrast to Guthrie and
Watson's vision of family oriented care, the family came to be seen as a
contaminating influence from which children should be removed. This was
the era of the large orphanage, physically and symbolically removed from
public view and consciousness. At its most extreme, the “rescue” philosophy was manifest in the forced emigration of children to the
Colonies in pursuit of a better life. The large charities were foremost
in the orphanage movement, Quarriers and Aberlour being the most obvious
examples. Boarding out was still common but, in line with the rescuing
philosophy, children were sent further afield, often to isolated farms
or crofts. Those who offended could be committed by the courts to
Reformatory Schools (the successors to the “ragged” schools).

Psychoanalytic Influences
The emergence of the psychoanalytic movement in the early twentieth
century led to a questioning of some of the more traditional and
authoritarian ways of responding to children. This led to some
interesting experiments in child rearing and education. Perhaps the best
known of these are Summerhill, established in England by a Scot, A.S
Neil and Kilquhanity in The South West of Scotland, established by John
and Morag Aitkenhead. These schools known as "free schools" sought to
allow children to develop free from the constraints of adult or societal
oppression. Whilst the ideas behind Summerhill and Kilquhanity remained
minority ones, the influence of Freudian psychology was also apparent in
the growth of the child guidance movement, which emphasised the
importance of working with children in the context of their family
relationships. In keeping with Scotland's educational tradition, the
child guidance movement was rooted within the field of educational
psychology. The large orphanage, or children's village, however remained
the most common response to children who were deemed not to be able to
live at home.

The UK Children Act 1908 brought together previous
legislation relating to children. The Children and Young Person's
(Scotland) Act 1937 established separate juvenile courts, which were
required in their proceedings to "have regard to the welfare of the
child". Essentially, this piece of legislation marks the formal
embodiment of the “welfare” principle, which has been central to
subsequent child care philosophy and regulation.

The Clyde Committee, reporting in 1946, in response
to concerns about the welfare of children in foster care criticised
large scale institutional living and proposed that provision for
children should be provided in smaller units, located nearer to centres
of population. Clyde was influenced by some of the thinking of the child
guidance movement and proposed the family as the preferred unit of care.
Substitute care was to be modelled on family life. This resulted in the
development of the family group home model, whereby groups of children
were looked after by “auntie” and “uncle” figures, ostensibly modelling
the experience on family living.

Kilbrandon and the Social Work (Scotland)
Act
A watershed in Scottish welfare provision came with the publication of
The Kilbrandon Report in 1964. This firmly reaffirmed a “welfare” as
opposed to a “justice” model of dealing with young people. The preferred
approach was to be education”. "in its widest sense"(Kilbrandon 1964).
Kilbrandon proposed the establishment of Social Education departments to
oversee his proposed developments. These ideas were developed by the
emerging social work lobby and taken forward in a White Paper, Social
Work and the Community (1966) thereafter becoming law in The Social Work
(Scotland) Act (1968). The 1968 Act established professional social work
rather than the social education departments envisaged by Kilbrandon and
located provision for children and young people within the new
generically structured departments. The Social Work (Scotland) Act
heralded the introduction of Scotland's rightly acclaimed Children's
Hearing system. The Hearing system involves a panel of three lay
volunteers deciding on a case "in the best interests of the child".
Children can be referred to the Children's Panel on a range of different
grounds, only one of which involves offending, the others reflecting
their own needs for welfare or protection. Philosophically the system
works on the same assumptions which characterised earlier approaches,
namely that the underlying needs of those who offended and those in need
of care and protection, are essentially similar.

Ironically, a system, which is charged to promote
the welfare of and to act in the best interests of the child, currently
finds itself under increasing attack on two fronts. On the one hand
those concerned with youth crime bemoan what they consider to be its
lack of teeth, whilst, on the other, those adopting a rights perspective
express concern that children's legal rights are not adequately
safeguarded within the system.

Residential Child Care within Social Work
The Social Work (Scotland) Act located residential child care within the
new social work profession. The early years of this arrangement were
characterised by considerable optimism. Inroads were made to reduce the
numbers of children “lost” in the care system and a greater sense of
purpose was introduced to care planning. However, at an ideological
level, social work was influenced by the literature of dysfunction
deriving, in large part from Goffman's (1966) critique of institutions.
The underlying philosophical and policy thrust was in the direction of
closing, or at least minimising the use of residential care. Alongside
this anti-institutional bias, substitute family care became the option
of choice for children deemed unable to continue to live at home.

Whilst the professional preference for family based
care was pursued in good faith and on the strength of an evolving
understanding of concepts of attachment, it also began to coalesce
during the 1980s with Thatcherite demands for public service economy.
The family as the preferred model of service delivery became
increasingly pronounced, as permanence theory became paradigmatic in
relation to social work with children and families. Residential care in
early articulations of this theory was not considered to be an
intervention capable of offering permanence (Milligan 1998). The trouble
with Permanence theory however, along with other approaches such as
normalisation and minimal intervention, could become elevated to
ideology and prevent the appropriate assessment of children in need of
out of home care against a range of perhaps more appropriate resources
(Fulcher 2001).

The 1990s
If the 1980s were characterised by the dominance of family oriented
ideologies of care, the 1990s have seen the social work task with
children and families become increasingly defined by revelations of
abuse, initially within families but subsequently in residential care.
The application of a predominant child protection focus to practice
risks detracting from the essential developmental task of residential
child care. This is compounded by the application of managerialist
principles and procedures in relation to complex areas of practice such
as care and control and “safe-caring,” the result of which can feel to
practitioners to be a seemingly endless cycle of complaint and
investigation.

The 1990s too, partly as a result of the crisis
induced by abuse scandals, saw the reawakening of political interest in
the discipline. In 1992, Angus Skinner the Chief Inspector of Social
Work Services for Scotland produced a review of residential childcare.
Rather than merely picking over the lessons of past abuse, The
Skinner Report published in 1992 as "Another Kind of Home" set out
a number of principles of practice, (subsequently known as "The Skinner
Principles). Skinner was important in a number of respects, not least of
which was his recommendation to create a central resource point for
those involved in residential care. This led to the inception of The
Centre for Residential Child Care (CRCC) in 1994 which became the focus,
in Scotland and indeed more widely, for the development of practice in
residential childcare. One of the things the CRCC did was to help embed
Skinner’s Principles into a more general framework within which
residential child care in Scotland might be considered. The eight
principles are,

Individuality and development

Rights

Good basic care

Education

Health

Partnership with parents

Child centred collaboration

A feeling of safety

Together, these principles provide a backdrop
against which residential childcare has been considered over the past
decade. Another Kind of Home also identified targets to improve the
qualification levels of staff in residential child care, stating that
90% of senior staff and 30% of care staff should be professionally
qualified in social work. A further 60% of care staff were to be
qualified to Higher National Certificate (HNC)/SVQ level.

The other major government report specific to
Scotland in the course of the nineties was the “Children's Safeguards
Review” (The Kent Report) 1997. Kent provides an insightful picture of
residential care, asserting that the complexity of the task requires a
workforce qualified beyond what would be required for other areas of
social work. He toys with, but pulls back from, some fairly radical
suggestions for improvement, such as the adoption of a European model of
social pedagogy.

Children Scotland Act
The major legislative development in the past decade has been the
Children (Scotland) Act 1995. The new Act’s provisions draw upon the
Social Work (Scotland) Act, updated to reflect, amongst other things,
the influence of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children
in the care of the local authority whether living at home under
supervision or in residential or foster care are now “looked after”. Those who are in residential resources are described as “accommodated” by the local authority. This rather cumbersome terminology was
introduced to try and protect rights and remove stigma but it has proved
unpopular with the children and young people, and their advocacy
organisation Who Cares? Scotland has returned to using the term “residential care” (Furnivall, McQuarrie and Smith 2001).

Social Work Education
Following on from the Social Work (Scotland) Act, CCETSW (1973) asserted
somewhat equivocally that residential care was social work (Millar
2002). Professional training was claimed to provide a generic
experience, equipping students for work across the range of settings in
which social workers operate. It was argued that setting the same
qualification would address the comparative low status of residential
workers. Unlike traditional professions such as teaching or the law,
both of which have retained very distinct Scottish identities, social
work developed from the basis of the alignment and transferability of
qualifications across the UK.

Since the early 1990–s, practice placements have
been assessed against a range of competencies set out by CCETSW.
Training proceeds from the assumption that competencies are transferable
across practice settings within the diverse domains of criminal justice,
children and families or community care and can include community based,
day care or residential settings. The appropriateness of a competency
based approach to student learning remains subject to considerable
debate within social work (O–Hagan 1996). Wider pedagogical arguments
notwithstanding, the application of current competencies to residential
child care is particularly problematic as the nature of these are
casework or case management biased and require feats of lateral thinking
to fit them to residential placements.

A majority of workers entering residential child
care settings from social work training courses do not feel suitably
prepared for the task, in comparison to those moving into other social
work settings. (Triseliotis and Marsh 1996). This is perhaps not
surprising, as the experiences of many workers, qualified and socialised
in social work, will often not have introduced them to fundamental
conceptual material on group care such as “lifespace”. Schooled within a
dominant social work discourse, practice experience for many, may merely
reinforce negative perceptions of residential child care. Reflecting the
comparatively small number of qualified residential workers within
social work, the discipline is similarly under-represented in the
institutions in which social work is taught. Group care is often taught
in universities and colleges, when it is taught at all, by those with no
practice experience in the area (Lane 2001).

Whilst there were major initiatives after the
passage of the Social Work (Scotland) Act, to ensure that all field
social workers became qualified, no similar requirements were placed on
workers in residential child care. Qualification rates have remained
stubbornly low and if anything appear to be declining (SIRCC 2001). This
has contributed to the adoption of the Scottish Vocational
Qualifications (SVQs) in social care, a vocationally based system
whereby practice is assessed against a range of learning outcomes.
Whilst SVQs have been presented as a positive and inclusive way to
enable the current workforce to gain a formal qualification, it is also
argued that they reflect a major “dumbing down” of residential child
care and the institutionalisation of a second class status. Other
commentators pose serious questions about the educational integrity and
practical utility of the qualification (Heron and Chakrabarti 2002).

Current Situation
The population of residential child care has plummeted over the past
thirty years. This pattern continues. The latest figures, for March 2000
(Scottish Executive) show a figure of 1973 places in residential
accommodation - a decrease of 2.6% from the previous year. However,
admissions for the same year stood at 7692, three quarters of whom had
been resident for less than a month and only 8% of whom had been
resident for more than a year. The turnover in short-term admissions
appears to reflect the inclusion of respite services in the figures. The
small proportion of those long term residents serves to emphasise that
residential care is rarely seen as a long term option. Of those in
residential care, 70% were boys, a figure that rises to 82.5% of those
in secure accommodation. The average size of a unit is 11, but this
figure masks a range of provision from 2-3 bedded units to large
residential school. Despite assertions that residential care ought to be
a positive choice for young people (Skinner 1992) the reality is that it
is often a residual service dealing with those children and youth who
cannot be maintained in any other service.

Current Issues facing Residential Child Care
in Scotland
From recent discussions on CYC-NET, pointing to youth care in crisis,
Scotland would appear to face similar problems to other countries and
traditions. An added dimension though is the discipline’s current
location and conceptualisation within the wider social work profession.
Assertions that residential care is social work are increasingly hard to
sustain. There may indeed be a fundamental fault line between social
work and child and youth care. The former, irrespective of any rhetoric
about being non-judgmental or empowering, is a pathology based
intervention. A consequence of such a focus is that children are
identified as requiring protection as the victims of crime, or
punishment as its perpetrators. Child and youth care by contrast,
although it may often fall short of doing so, ought to be based around
more universal notions of learning and growth.

Conceptualisation within social work entails that
residential child care is currently considered within the dominant
discourse of social work, which, in relation to children and families,
is child protection. The strength of this discourse is such that even
cases that ought to have a welfare focus are viewed through a child
protection lens (Spratt 2002). In the context of residential child care,
the focus on protection and safety whilst important, often exists in
tension with other developmental imperatives such as the need to allow
children and youth space to explore and develop and to do so in close
relationships with the adults caring for them.

Reflecting the strength of the child protection
discourse, revelations of abuse in residential child care and the
organisational reaction to these can be manifest in a tendency to
pathologise care. A result of this is the increasing location of control
and authority out with establishments themselves, contrary to what is
known about the be need for suitably autonomous leadership at unit level
(DOH 1998). This can have the effect of disempowering staff on the
ground, reinforcing a negative image of the sector and reducing morale
and the potential to attract and retain staff (Corby et al 2001).

Residential child care is marginalised within social
work. There is a sense that the social work establishment doesn’t really
know what to do with it, but doesn’t feel able to cast it loose. Major
texts, Social Work, Themes, Issues and Critical Debates (Adams et al
1998) and Social Work practice (Coulshed and Orme 1998) do not include
chapters on residential child care. The difficulty in achieving a
suitably qualified workforce within a social work framework has led to
an incremental “dumbing down” of the level and nature of qualifications
deemed appropriate to the task. It now seems that, following on from
developments in England, these will be institutionalised at VQ level
(SSSC 2002). The focus of VQs on merely evidencing existing practice
rather than on promoting critical reflection and understanding of self
and others, render them particularly unsuitable to the dynamic and
humanistic endeavour that is cyc. Yet in the absence of any meaningful
debate about the nature and place of residential child care, it can seem
easier to reduce the job to one that can be broken down into a series of
discrete tasks and to manage the workforce through ever greater
regulation and discipline. All of this impedes the development of an
appropriate and distinct professional identity for cyc.

Possibilities
Historically, Scottish approaches to residential child care reflect
family, community and broadly educationally based preferences. In that
sense, Scotland can draw similarities with other traditions of practice,
which do not locate direct service delivery for children and youth
within the social work profession. Northern European countries, favour a
social pedagogy model which assumes a broadly educational focus to
practice and to the training of those working with children and youth
across a variety of settings. Canada, most North American states and
countries such as South Africa, train workers specifically for child and
youth care. The nature of the task is increasingly being considered in
relation to working with families (Garfat). Closer to home a renewed
interest in ideas of social pedagogy is emerging in England where The
Dept. of Health has commissioned the Thomas Coram Unit at the University
of London to undertake comparative research across European models of
practice. A new book (Moss and Petrie 2002) offers alternative
conceptualisations of childhood, drawing on ideas from social pedagogy
and argues for a move away from children's services to children's
spaces. The Social Education Trust, comprising practitioners and
academics with an interest in residential child care, is also taking
that debate forward in England. Developments in the Republic of Ireland
view the proposed registration of workers there as an opportunity to
establish a discrete professional identity for child and youth care
(McElwee 2001).

It is worth considering, in the face of the problems
of recruitment, retention and professional identity confronting
residential child care in Scotland and the UK, that across the North Sea
in Denmark, the social pedagogue model of training is that country’s most heavily subscribed of all professional training courses. This might
suggest that work with children and young people is not itself
unattractive but does require a conducive and validating professional
context.

The Crossroads
Scotland stands at something of a crossroads in terms of what the future
holds for child and youth care.

There are positive developments, such as the
establishment of SIRCC. The residential care pathway on the Diploma in
Social Work and the development of the Masters programme holds out the
hope of enhancing the standing of the discipline. Such glimmers of light
however are potentially extinguished by some heavy clouds overhead. The “dumbing down” of the type and level of qualification deemed appropriate
to the task does not augur well for the recruitment or retention of
appropriately committed and insightful staff, nor indeed for the
attainment of professional status. There is an insularity and a lack of
ambition around current policy directions which belie Scotland's
occasionally enlightened approaches to children and youth. If child and
youth care is to develop as a profession it would do well to look back
and learn from it’s own historical and cultural traditions of practice
and to look outwards from current reality to consider some of the
possibilities offered by other traditions. This calls for a reappraisal
of the assumptions and relationships which currently define the field
here.

Triseliotis, J. and Marsh P. (1996) Ready to
Practice? Social Workers and Probation Officers: Their Training and
their First Year in Work, Aldershot: Avebury.

The Author Mark Smith was a practitioner and
manager in child and youth care settings in Scotland over a period of
twenty years. He is currently Course Director of the MSc. in Advanced
Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

THE INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK (CYC-Net)Registered
Non-Profit and Public Benefit Organisation in the Republic of South Africa
(031-323-NPO, PBO 930015296)